1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to information distribution systems and information management methods, and can be applied to, for example, a system that issues and manages concert tickets.
2. Description of the Related Art
Concert tickets, etc., are issued in stores in response to requests accepted, or accessing an issuance server in accordance with accepted telephone reservations, whereby the sale of a plurality of tickets for one seat number is prevented.
Accordingly, when a user directly buys a ticket from a store, the store checks whether a seat is available, and the user buys an issued ticket. When a user uses telephone reservation to buy a ticket, after making a reservation, the user can receive the ticket by mail, or the user can buy the ticket from a store, based on the verification of a reservation number.
For issuing tickets at stores, as described above, issuing equipment must be provided for each store. Also, for sending reserved tickets by mail, various types of equipment and various operations are necessary. Accordingly, such a ticket selling method has a problem in that the distribution of tickets to users is troublesome.
In addition, after each user obtains a ticket, the management thereof is a complicated. By way of example, when a user distributes tickets among friends, the user needs to meet the friends to hand out the tickets. If the user is unable to meet the friends, the user must distribute the tickets to them by mail or the like. This case will require time and money for delivering the tickets to the friends, and accidents such as loss of the tickets cannot be completely prevented. Also when a user transfers an obtained ticket to a third party, the transfer similarly requires time and money, and accidents such as loss of the tickets may occur. If a user loses a concert ticket, the user is prevented from going to the concert.
As one solution to the above problems, a method is considered in which tickets are sold such that each user records various types of information in an integrated circuit (IC) card by accessing it from a personal computer. In other words, in this method, instead of each ticket produced by printing concert-related information on paper, the IC card in which the information is recorded is used. This method can simplify ticket distribution to the user because online processing is possible.
However, this method requires a personal computer and an IC card reader/writer connected to the personal computer. Also, if a user does not have such equipment, that user must go to a store having the equipment. Moreover, after a ticket is delivered to each user, it cannot be transferred to a third party.